Obama asks Iran to give back downed drone

PanARMENIAN.Net - U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday, December 12, that the United States had asked Iran to return an American surveillance drone that the Iranians say they captured on December 4, The New York Times reports.

It was Obama’s first public comment about the drone, a remote-controlled spying aircraft, in a case that has raised American tensions with Iran.

“We have asked for it back we’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said of the drone in a short session with reporters at the White House.

He did not elaborate on the episode or on Iranian assertions that its forces had captured the drone through a digital attack on the aircraft’s avionics, which they say caused it to land safely inside northern Iran.

American officials have attributed the loss of the drone to a technical malfunction. Just how the drone, which was managed by CIA controllers in neighboring Afghanistan, ended up on the ground in Iran, apparently nearly intact, remains unclear.

Last Thursday, the Iranian authorities staged an elaborate televised video presentation of what they said was the captured drone, an RQ-170 Sentinel. The RQ-170, a batwing aircraft with radar-evading technology, is capable of lingering for hours at 50,000 feet and monitoring developments on the ground. American officials have said the aircraft was part of an intensified effort to monitor suspect nuclear sites in Iran.